What Are Some Good Channels to Promote Your Apps?

App review websites are not the only place where people may learn about your app. And being featured on the App Store is not the only way to get thousands of users. There are lots of other cool channels to reach your target audience.

Look for relevant subreddits and post the link to your app there. Make sure to write a compelling and intriguing title. Don’t forget to read the rules for particular subreddits and don’t spam. Many subreddits disapprove of shortened links, so avoid using them.

In order to find the relevant subreddit, use either a search field or just type reddit.com/r/[topic]. For example, I found subreddits ValentinesDay and Valentine for promoting our Valentine app. In some subreddits, your post will disappear in a minute (admins may remove it) or quickly move to the bottom of the page. Other subreddits will bring you lots of new users. It’s all about relevancy and experimenting.

This channel works, if you happen to find the question which can be answered with your app’s features. Quora has nothing against shortened links, so you may shorten your iTunes link on goo.gl and track how many readers have checked out your app. An interesting thing about Quora is that often your answers may be read months after you posted them. So get ready for some long-term results and update your answers if required.

Those who follow the question may see it under their Notifications. Others may later stumble upon your answer by finding either the question or your answer via the search field. So make sure to include the keywords. If you see other questions about apps that you may answer mentioning other apps, do it. This will grow your credibility on Quora.

In my experience, Twitter doesn’t work unless you have a followership comprised of your target users. There is one cool trick, though. If you are lucky to have some popular artists, designers or musicians contribute to your app, you should mention them. They will probably retweet you and this way promote your app to their followers.

Instagram

For photo apps this is an absolute must-have.

Again, small followership is not a hindrance here. Using the right hashtags may be of great help. Use Iconosquare, Clarifai.com and Instagram accounts of competing apps to get ideas.

Some popular hashtags may be later used as keywords and greatly improve your ASO. So knowing your way with hashtags has multifold benefits.

Instagram can even be used to promote games as mentioned in this post by Sensortower. Again, do your homework with the hashtags.

App Cross Promotion

Why not get the users of your existing apps to check out your new app? This is very simple and cheap app promotion channel (free, actually, provided that you have a free SDK like AppDK). This way you may show a message/banner in your existing apps prompting users to download your new app. All large publishers (like Ketchapp) are doing it. There is no reason why you shouldn’t.

If there are any forums or social networks where you successfully promote your apps and games, feel welcome to share them in comments!